Lend Me a Tenor by Ken Ludwig

First published: 1986

First produced: 1985, as Opera Buffa at the American Stage Festival, Milford, New Hampshire

Type of plot: Farce; comedy

Time of work: September, 1934

Locale: A hotel suite in Cleveland, Ohio

Principal Characters:

• Saunders, a middle-aged authoritarian manager of the Cleveland Grand Opera
• Max, a company gofer and assistant to Saunders
• Maggie, the pretty and quirky girlfriend of Max and daughter of Saunders
• Tito Merelli, a world-famous Italian tenor
• Maria, his lively Italian wife
• Bellhop, an aspiring singer
• Diana, a sexy soprano in her mid-thirties
• Julia, a chair of the Opera Guild

The Play

The play opens in Tito Merelli’s hotel suite on the night of his performance with the Cleveland Grand Opera’s production of Guiseppi Verdi’s Otello (1887). At stage right is a sitting room with a door to the hallway and a kitchen door off the right. At stage left is a bedroom with doors to a closet, bathroom, and hallway. Another door connects the two rooms. The living room is furnished minimally with a sofa, pouf, radio, telephone, and coffee table, and the bedroom with a bed and bureau.

When the lights come up, Maggie is revealed rapturously listening to a recording of Tito on the radio. Max enters in a panic, since Tito has not yet arrived. Maggie soon reveals to her longtime boyfriend that she has a need to have a “fling” before settling down into marriage, preferably with someone like Tito. Maggie’s father, Saunders, arrives, also in a panic over the tenor’s absence, and Maggie attempts to calm him with a phenobarbital pill, leaving the bottle out. When Saunders hears that Tito is downstairs, he ushers Maggie out, tells Max to keep Tito away from “liquor and women,” and goes down to the lobby. Maggie sneaks back in through the bedroom door. Max discovers her too late to remove her before Saunders arrives with Tito, his wife Maria, and an eager-to-please Bellhop.

Tito refuses to obey Maria’s request to take tranquilizers to calm him for the performance, so she storms into the bedroom. After Tito announces that he will skip the afternoon rehearsal, Saunders admonishes Max to make sure Tito gets some sleep and then exits. Max and Tito soon become friends, with Tito giving Max a singing lesson. When Tito offers Max some wine, Max spikes Tito’s drink with Saunders’s tranquilizers after Tito, to placate Maria, has angrily finished off his own tranquilizers. Once Tito consumes his laced wine, he and Max sing a duet while Maria pens a vaguely worded “Dear John” letter. Tito discovers Maria’s note and lays it next to the empty pill bottle before passing out.

In the next scene, Max goes to wake Tito and finds Maria’s note next to the empty pill bottle, which now reads like a suicide note. Saunders enters to news of Tito’s death and after much panic and anguish, cajoles Max into impersonating Tito so they do not have to refund the audience’s ticket money. As Max changes into Tito’s costume and makeup, the sitting room fills with Tito’s fans. As confusion ensues, Max, disguised as Tito, ushers his guests off to the theater. Tito rolls off the bed just before blackout.

Act 2 takes place after a successful performance by Max. After Saunders congratulates him, he orders Max to change clothes. As Saunders exits, Tito appears in the bedroom and hides in the closet. On his way to the bathroom, Max discovers Tito’s body is gone and exits to get Saunders. Tito crosses to the sitting room to find three seductresses in succession: Julia, Diana, and Maggie. Tito sends Julia away but hides Diana and Maggie. Saunders enters thinking Tito is really Max in disguise and sends him into the bedroom so he can answer the door. Finding Max at the door, Saunders realizes that Tito is alive. Saunders again orders Max to get changed and exits to find Tito, who has left the suite. While Max is ambushed by Diana in the bathroom, Maggie emerges from the closet and crosses to the sitting room. Max bursts out of the bathroom to find Maggie undressed. As she lays Max down on the sofa, Tito enters and is put to bed by Diana. The couples make love as the lights fade.

Fifteen minutes later, as the women exit the stage for a moment, Tito opens the connecting door, sees Max, and, convinced that he is losing his mind, flees into the hallway. Max suddenly finds himself alone with two angry women. After stammering out a few syllables, he locks himself in the bathroom. As the women get dressed, the rest of the cast converge at the bathroom door. Soon Max comes out as himself to greet everyone. They exit, leaving Max alone with Maggie, who figures it out. She kisses Max to the sound of wedding bells.

Dramatic Devices

The play employs a number of devices common to farces: mistaken identity, double entendres, a playful sense of rhythm generally delivered with alacrity and precision, intricate blocking and sight gags, and frequent entrances and exits utilizing the six doors onstage. There are several sections characterized by silent physical comedy unencumbered by dialogue. The most elaborate is a moment in act 1, when the Bellhop is attempting to place suitcases into a closet in which Maggie is hiding. Max, discovering her in the closet, attempts to extract her while preventing the Bellhop from seeing her. The action takes place in a nearly pantomime fashion, with Max and Maggie frenetically gesturing to each other and the Bellhop blithely going about the business of repeatedly opening the closet door that Max keeps shutting.

In an author’s note, Ludwig suggests that in casting, acting ability is more important than singing ability. Far from being merely practical advice, this suggests a deeper connection with the genre and structure of the play. For some time, the audience is asked to believe that Maggie should not be capable of recognizing her fiancé in his disguise as Tito, and that others (such as Saunders) should also succumb to the mistaken identity. In this play, the audience is eager to suspend their disbelief in favor of the fun offered by the plot line.

This play may be distinguished from the classic farce by its metatheatrical features. A term coined in 1963 by critic Lionel Abel in his book of the same name, “metatheatre” signals such devices as the play-within-a-play or performance-within-a-performance (such as the opera duet in act 1). Certainly it includes masquerading, which forms the basis for the mistaken-identity device that drives the action of the second act. There are also a few moments in the first act during which, in order to make a point to Max, Saunders addresses the audience as if they were members of the opera audience.

In some of the play’s early performances, notably on the American West Coast, there was some controversy over the use of blackface as part of the Otello makeup, a device whose purpose is to make the identity confusion between Max and Tito more plausible.

Critical Context

Besides writing plays, Ken Ludwig is also an entertainment lawyer in the Washington, D.C., area. Although only a part-time playwright, he established quite a repertory in little more than a decade. His body of work includes Moon over Buffalo (pr., pb. 1996), Sullivan and Gilbert: A Play with Music (pr. 1983, pb. 1988), and the books for two musicals: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (pr. 2001) and Crazy for You (pr. 1991), the latter of which was conceived by him and won three Tony Awards for best musical, costume designer, and choreography. Lend Me a Tenor is commonly considered his best nonmusical work. Its 1986 London production was nominated for the Olivier Award, and its 1989 Broadway production was nominated for seven Tony Awards, including best play, and won two of the awards, one for best actor and the other for best director.

Ludwig has noted that he derives some inspiration from the classics, such as William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (pr. c. 1598-1599, pb. 1600), and is particularly interested in reinventing classic devices for a modern audience. This is not to say that he patterns his plays after specific works, rather that he uses the devices that are common to comedy and farce. In fact, Ludwig’s works all seem to derive some inspiration from the past, from literary and musical genres and styles to performers and their reputations.

The play is particularly useful for teaching comical devices and farce for advanced acting students, who have access to functional doors in the classroom. It breaks down nicely into scenes with two to four people, which facilitates scene study.

Sources for Further Study

Dunn, Don. “Broadway’s Brightest Lights.” Business Week, June 19, 1989, 105.

Hodgson, Moira. “Lend Me a Tenor.” Nation 248 (April 17, 1989): 534-535.

Hoyle, Martin. “Lend Me a Tenor.” Plays and Players 392 (May, 1986): 22.

Oliver, Edith. “Zaks Rides Again.” The New Yorker 65 (March 13, 1989): 74.

Wetzsteon, Ross. “Zaks Appeal: Lincoln Center’s King of Comedy.” New York 23 (May 28, 1990): 50-57.